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Achieving our goal requires cooperative collaboration amongst members and staff. Members posts remain appropriate and relevant to topics. Terms of Service are clearly posted to help members maintain the dignity of the board. Members of this group are at a stage in their healing to independently regulate their own behavior, as well as keeping themselves safe while on the forums. Staff regularly monitor posts and replies to ensure the board remains a safe and comfortable environment of learning for everyone.

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The Satanic panic collided with American pop culture in the 1980s. Themass media, particularly television, has long embraced the "if itbleeds it leads" doctrine, so those macabre, let it bleed storiesabout ritual abuse were initially snapped up by the nightly news, andthey waggled their way into the living rooms of millions of Americans.But leveler heads in the FBI and media would eventually prevail, andthey exposed all those nasty, sordid stories about ritual abuse asnothing more than witch-hunt hysteria, and the Satanic panic quicklyfell by the wayside and drifted into obscurity like the pet rock.

One of the most publicized of the Satanic panic cases was the 1987investigation of the day care center at the U.S. Army's Presidio basein San Francisco. According to newspaper accounts, approximately sixtychildren were molested at the Presidio. Some of the children discussedhorrific, ritual abuse and five of the children contracted Chlamydia,a sexually transmitted disease. A number of the children said they hadbeen transported off base from the Presidio and their abuse wasphotographed.

Presidio victims told investigators of unfathomable abuse thatincluded being forced to eat feces, drink urine, and also having bloodsmeared all over their bodies. The abuse described by the victimscertainly sounds so incomprehensible that it is difficult to believe,but a few years earlier children at West Point's day care center madesimilar allegations regarding ritual abuse: They too claimed they hadbeen forced to eat feces and drink urine and also been transportedfrom the base and photographed. One three-year-old child at WestPoint's day care center was taken to the hospital because of alacerated vagina--the girl said a teacher had hurt her. The Armymaintained it thoroughly investigated the abuse at West Point, but noindictments were returned against the children's perpetrators.

The ritual abuse described by the children at the Presidio and WestPoint day care centers was remarkably similar, so it begs a ratherdisturbing question: Were these children from disparate geographicallocations actually abused in the same ritualistic manner or were theyconjuring up the same, incomprehensible stories?

In The Franklin Scandal, I also discuss a cult called the Finders anda subsequent law enforcement investigation into their activities: OnFebruary 4, 1987, a concerned citizen notified the Tallahassee PoliceDepartment that he had observed six white children, poorly dressed,bruised, dirty, and behaving like wild animals, in a Tallahassee park.The children were accompanied by two well-dressed white males drivinga white 1979 Dodge van with Virginia plates. The Tallahassee policeresponded to the call and took the children and adults into custody.The children told Tallahassee police they were not allowed to liveindoors and were given food only as a reward. The Tallahassee policecharged the two adults with felony child abuse, and they were held ona $100,000 bond. The children were placed in protective custody.

The Tallahassee police suspected child pornography, so they contactedthe U.S. Customs Service (USCS), which has a Child Pornography andProtection Unit. Shortly thereafter, a detective from the Washington,DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) contacted special agent RamonMartinez of the USCS, who was spearheading the investigation into theFinders. The MPD detective indicated that the Tallahassee arrests wereprobably linked to a case that he was investigating in the DC area,involving a cult called the Finders. An informant had conveyed to thedetective that the Finders operated various businesses out of awarehouse in DC and housed children at a second warehouse. (I'veattached a PDF containing the U.S. Customs report on the Finders.)

"The information was specific in describing blood rituals and sexualorgies involving children, and an as yet unsolved murder in which theFinders may be involved," wrote special agent Martinez in his USCSreport.

The MPD and US Customs acquired a search warrant for the Washington,DC warehouses occupied by the Finders: The two warehouses would giveinvestigators a series of grisly blood curdling discoveries as theyexecuted the search warrant. They discovered a telex that specificallyordered the purchase of two children in Hong Kong to be arrangedthrough a contact in the Chinese Embassy, a number of photographs ofnude children with one appearing to be a child on display thataccented the child's genitals, and also a photo album containingphotos of adults and children dressed in white sheets that portrayedthe execution, disembowelment, skinning, and dismemberment of thegoats by the children. The US Customs report also relayed that theFinders had an interest in purchasing children, trading, andkidnapping.

"There were what appeared to be a training areas for the children andwhat appeared to be an alter set up in a residential are of thewarehouse," wrote special agent Martinez in his report. Many jars ofurine and feces were located in this area.

Newspapers around the country got wind of the story, ranging from TheNew York Times and Washington Post to the Orange County Register, andalmost all of the articles pertained to the investigations launched bythe Tallahassee police, MPD, and USCS. The earliest articles discussedthe Finders probable involvement in Satanism, and a spokesman for theTallahassee police said that one of the children showed signs ofsexual abuse. Moreover, an FBI spokesman announced that the Finderswere being investigated for the transportation of children acrossstate lines for immoral purposes or kidnapping.

In The Franklin Scandal, I talk about how the CIA quashed the multiplejurisdiction investigation into the Finders: The two incarceratedFinders were sprung from jail and all child abuse charges weredropped, and the children would eventually be repatriated with thecult. Moreover, after the CIA's intervention into the case, I reporton a news conference kicked off by MPD Chief Maurice Turner, Jr. Atthe news conference, Chief Turner backpedaled with ferocity, rejectingallegations that the Finders were involved in satanic rituals or childabuse. The chief also elevated the Finders from a cult to a communalgroup. He neglected to mention that the Finders were a communal groupthat reportedly had an interest in purchasing children, trading, andkidnapping. He omitted discussing the jars of feces and urine too.

In The Franklin Scandal, I also discuss the Extreme Abuse Survey(EAS), an international online survey for adult survivors of extremeabuse that was conducted between January 1 and March 30 of 2007. TheEAS respondents were questioned about the use of feces and blood intheir ritual abuse, and 1,106 of EAS respondents answered thequestions regarding abuse with feces and blood. Fifty percent of EASrespondents said that they had been subjected to abuse with feces, and63% responded that the use of blood was integral to their abuse. Solike the victims of the Presidio and West Point day care centers,hundreds of EAS respondents, who come from a myriad of disparatelocations around the globe, convey the same horrific, implausibleevents. (I've attached a PDF on the findings of the EAS)

Indeed, researchers in the field of ritual abuse feel that thestrength of their findings is that the victims who claim to have beenritually abused are from disparate geographic locations andsocioeconomic strata, but, yet, they describe the same improbable,horrific events, and studies have validated their contentions. A 1995study published in The Journal of Psychohistory surveyed fiveorganizations throughout the United states offering a hotline forchildren, including Childhelp USA, a bellwether in the advocacy andassistance for abused children: The study found that in 1992 roughly23,000 calls reporting the ritual abuse of children had been logged bythe five hotlines.

So the Presidio victims' claim that they were forced to eat feces anddrink urine seems preposterous on the surface, but if theirallegations are examined in the wider context of extreme abuse orritual abuse, the children's allegations shed their implausibility,because they are corroborated by multiple sources from widelydisparate geographic locations and points in time. However, skepticsof the accounts given by the Presidio victims and the hundreds ofother alleged victims who discuss extreme or ritualistic abusemaintain that these memories were planted by therapists--therapistsfrom widely disparate geographic locations and points in time.

The False Memory Syndrome (FMSF), founded in 1992, is the primarybellwether and cheerleader in the skeptics stance that therapists areguilty of implanting these horrific stories that have no basis inreality. The FMSF Advisory Board has members with lofty academiccredentials who receive hefty fees for globetrotting around the worldand acting as expert witnesses to debunk memories of child abuse.

In fact, in an earlier post, I mentioned that an FMSF Advisory Boardmember had debunked the dissociative amnesia or repressed memories ofa former Boys Town student who claimed to have been molested by BoysTown priest Father James Kelly while he was a Boys Town student. TheFMSF Advisory Board member who scored an assist in having the BoysTown molestation case thrown out of court was Harrison Pope, MD, aHarvard-based psychiatrist. Dr. Pope claimed that studies endorsingrepressed memory tend to lack scientific validity and sometimesconfuse simple forgetfulness with repressed memory. The judge sidedwith Boys Town and Dr. Pope and the molestation case was tossed out,even though Father James Kelly, by multiple accounts, is a serialchild molester.

Despite the stance of the FMSF and its credential-laden experts, falsememories or dissociative amnesia is recognized as a bona fidecondition by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders(DSM), which is the bible of diagnosing psychiatric conditions,whereas the false memory syndrome is not. Moreover, multiple studieshave corroborated the realty of dissociative amnesia. A 1995 study,published in the Journal of Traumatic Stress, looked at 46 subjectswith PTSD. Over time, 35 of the study's subjects reported the gradualemergence of a personal narrative that they believed could be definedas an explicit memory lost to significant or total amnesia, and 77% ofthose subjects reported confirmation of that particular memory ofchildhood trauma.

The principle tenet of the FMSF and its supporters--false memories area syndrome affecting untold thousands--is looked upon withconsiderable mistrust in the therapeutic community. The majority oftherapists acknowledge that false memories occur, but they don't seethem as a syndrome permeating the masses. In fact, a number oftherapists look upon the FMSF with suspicion and even contempt.

And one need not dig very deeply into the FMSF to converge with themacabre. The FMSF was founded by Peter and Pamela Freyd who were bothacademics: Peter was a mathematician and Pamela had a PhD ineducation. Though the Freyds were married, they were alsostepsiblings--their respective parents had an affair and then married.The Freyds had two daughters and maintained that theirs was awholesome, happy family.

But the Toronto Star reported that the Freyds starred in a perverse,alternate universe of Father Knows Best: Peter Freyd boasted to hissmall daughters about his sexual experiences as an eleven-year-oldboy, calling himself a "male prostitute." He had at least one of hisdaughters, who was around ten years of age, dance naked in front ofhis friends with a fluffy Playboy bunny tail. Peter Freyd alsoencouraged his daughter Jennifer to read Lolita as a child, and helater kept a personalized cast model of his genitals on display in thefamily home--he was ultimately hospitalized for acute alcoholism.

The Freyds' oldest daughter Jennifer would earn a PhD in psychologyand become an academic too. In 1990, the happily married, academicallyrespected Jennifer started therapy, and, during her second therapeuticsession, she told her therapist that she was anxious about an upcomingvisit from her parents. Her therapist inquired if she had been abusedas a child--she initially didn't recall the abuse but sitting at homeafter the session she was flooded with memories of incest: "I wasshaking uncontrollably, overwhelmed with intense and terribleflashbacks," she later said.

Despite Jennifer's memories, she still consented to the visit by herparents. But in the midst of their visit, her father held up a turkeybaster and told her two-year-old son that lesbians used the basters toartificially inseminate themselves. The next morning, Jennifer'shusband asked the Freyds to leave, because of Peter's prior sexualabuse. Jennifer wanted the rift to be a private affair, but ten monthslater her mother anonymously published an article in Issues in ChildAbuse Accusations, an obscure journal devoted to discreditingallegations of child abuse.

In the article, Pamela Freyd claimed her daughter had falsely accusedher husband of incest and that the accusations arose during the courseof therapy in which the therapist elicited repressed memories. Thearticle also described Jennifer as sexually promiscuous,professionally unproductive, anorexic, and sexually frustrated. PamelaFreyd broke her anonymity and her daughter's anonymity regarding thearticle and sent it to Jennifer's superiors at the University ofOregon! The Freyds then formed FMSF. It should be noted thatJennifer's sister, Peter Freyd's brother, and his mother, who isPamela's stepmother, all support Jennifer's accusations and areestranged from Peter and Pamela Freyd.

The Freyds recruited Ralph Underwager, a Lutheran theologian andpsychologist, and his wife to be co-founders of the FMSF--Underwagerand his wife published Issues in Child Abuse Accusations, whichaccommodated Pamela Freyd's initial assault on her daughter'scredibility. Underwager would prove to have a relatively short tenurewith the FMSF, because of various statements he made to the press.London's Sunday Times reported that Underwager said ''scientificevidence'' has shown that 60% of women who are molested as childrenfelt that the experience was good for them--he contended the samecould be true for boys.

Underwager, apparently speaking as a theologian, granted an interviewto a Dutch pedophilia magazine where he discussed g*d's will andpedophilia: "The solution that I'm suggesting is that pedophilesbecome more positive," he said. "They should directly attack theconcept, the image, the picture of the pedophile as an evil, wickedand reprehensible exploiter of children . . . Pedophiles need tobecome more positive and make the claim that pedophilia is anacceptable expression of g*d's will for love and unity among humanbeings." After Underwager's comments were circulated, he tendered hisresignation from the FMSF's Advisory Board, but his wife continued tobe a stalwart of the Advisory Board. (I've attached a Word documentthat contains multiple articles on the FMSF, and note most the ofarticles weren't published in the U.S.)

Despite the FMSF's heavy baggage with Peter Freyd and RalphUnderwager, the FMSF campaign to influence the media has been hugelysuccessful. In 1995, PBS' Frontline aired a documentary on the falsememory controversy, Divided Memories, which relied extensively oninformation provided by the FMSF--many therapists felt it had anunrepentant FMSF topspin and validated the syndrome. One of theprograms viewers was William Freyd, brother of FMSF co-founder PeterFreyd, and he wasn't buying the notion of false memories put forth byDivided Memories--he even wrote a letter to Frontline:

Gentlemen:Peter Freyd is my brother. Pamela Freyd is both my stepsister and mysister-in-law. Jennifer and Gwendolyn are my nieces....

The False Memory Syndrome Foundation is a fraud designed to deny areality that Peter and Pam have spent most of their lives trying toescape. There is no such thing as a False Memory Syndrome. It is not,by any normal standard, a Foundation. Neither Pam nor Peter have anysignificant mental health expertise.

That the False Memory Syndrome Foundation has been able to excite somuch media attention has been a great surprise to those of us whowould like to admire and respect the objectivity and motives of peoplein the media.... We do not understand why you would "buy" such anobviously flawed story. But buy it you did, based on the severelybiased presentation you made of the memory issue that Peter and Pamcreated to deny their own difficult reality.

For the most part, you presented very credible parents and frequentlyquite incredible bizarre and exotic, alleged victims and therapists.Balance and objectivity would call for the presentation of morecredible alleged victims and more bizarre parents. While you didpresent some highly regarded therapists as commentators (Dr. Herman,for example), most of the therapists you presented as providers oftherapy were clearly not in the main stream. While this selection ofexamples may make for much more interesting T.V., it most certainlydoes not make for objectivity and fairness.

I would advance the idea that "Divided Memories" hurt victims, helpedabusers, and confused the public. I wonder why you thought theseresults would be in the public interest that Public Broadcasting isfunded to support.

Sincerely,William Freyd

The origins of the FMSF are certainly steeped in the macabre, but,after further excavation, I found yet another stratum of strangenesswith the FMSF: Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the CIA was involved inconducting a myriad of horrific and sadistic mind control experiments--some actually dealt with the erasing and implanting of memories--andTexas-based psychiatrist Dr. Colin Ross' book Bluebird connectedvarious members of the FMSF's Advisory Board to the CIA's mind controlexperiments.

FMSF Advisory Board members, particularly members who Dr. Rossconnected to the CIA's mind control programs, are extremely skepticalor completely disavow dissociation, a mental state where traumaticthoughts, emotions, sensations, and/or memories are compartmentalized,repressed and actually separated from an individual's identity. Thoughthe overwhelming majority of the CIA's mind control documentation wasordered destroyed, bureaucratic ineptitude enabled some of it tosurvive and one set of documents said "special attention will be givento dissociative states."

In that specific experiment, the documentation discussed administeringelectric shock, drugs, hypnosis, and psychological tricks to threegroups--psychotics, children, and mediums--to induce various states ofdissociation, including multiple personality, which the researchersthought would enhance the subjects' extrasensory perception.

So the CIA's own documentation explicitly concedes that its mindcontrol experimentation induced dissociative states, but, yet, theFMSF Advisory Board members who were affiliated with CIA mind controlprograms seem to deny dissociation or dissociative states. I've talkedto several therapists who believe that the FMSF has been used by theCIA to cover its tracks concerning its mind control programs and thepathologies and liabilities induced by those programs.

EAS investigators questioned EAS respondents about the whether or notthey knew if a government entity was involved in their abuse. Twenty-four percent of the 989 respondents to the question remembered beingused in government-sponsored mind control experiments in the UnitedStates, and 8% remembered being used in government-sponsored mindcontrol experiments in Canada.

The FMSF contends that therapists plant the fictitious memories ofritual abuse, which suggests that these therapists have religious ordogmatic agendas, but studies on therapists who diagnose ritual abuseindicate otherwise. Indeed, a study published in the Journal ofProfessional Psychology: Research and Practice looked at the questionof whether or not therapists who work with ritual abuse victims had atendency to be religious. The study looked at 497 Christian therapistsand 100 members of the American Psychological Association who didn'thave Christian affiliatons, and their respective diagnosises ofdissociative disorder, sexual abuse, and ritual abuse. The studyconcluded that Christian therapists and APA members diagnoseddissociative disorder and sexual abuse with the same frequency, andChristian therapists' diagnosis of ritual abuse was only slightlyhigher than the APA members questioned. A second study I found,published in The Journal of Child Abuse & Neglect, concluded thatreligious beliefs had no relationship in the identification of ritualabuse.

I've commented very little on the vast evidence that supports theexistence of ritual abuse, and those who want to read more on thesubject shouldn't find it too difficult to acquire numerous peer-reviewed papers published in credible journals. So there's theextensively corroborated reality of ritual abuse, and, conversely,there's the propaganda campaign of the FMSF.

As I looked closer and closer at the FMSF, I concluded that it was ahouse of cards: A journalist merely has to scratch the surface of theFMSF to see that all is not well in the house of Freyd or thatUnderwager has a perverse outlook that is anathema to the vastmajority of Americans. I then found myself wondering how the FMSFcould have bamboozled Frontline and a myriad of other publications andnews organizations that have trumpeted the FMSF's good deeds. I'vealso talked to numerous intelligent and rationale people over theyears who sincerely believe that ritual abuse is almost exclusivelythe byproduct of therapists' planting memories in gullible,defenseless patients, because they've been so seduced by the FMSFpropaganda promulgated by the mass media.

The Franklin Scandal demonstrates that the mass media has aided andabetted the cover up of child abuse, and, as I ventured deeper anddeeper into Franklin, I heard the names of big-time mediapersonalities who were possibly sexually compromised. Moreover, theCIA certainly has had an extensive history of infiltrating the media.

The CIA's infiltration of the media has been the crux of numerousbooks, so I'll just point out one facet of it, because I could easilyget bogged down on just this subject alone. In the late 1940s, the CIAappointed Frank Wisner director of the Office of Policy Coordination(OPC), and he conjured up Mockingbird, an operation to influence theAmerican media. Wisner reportedly recruited Philip Graham of theWashington Post to run the project within the industry. Deborah Davisauthored Katharine the Great, about Washington Post owner KatherineGraham, and according to Davis: "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned'respected members of the New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and othercommunications vehicles." Wisner's OPC also started Touchstone as aCIA front, and Touchstone produced a movie version of Orwell's AnimalFarm. It was decided to get the film made in Britain to disguise CIAinvolvement in the project, and E. Howard Hunt was even involved inthe production of the film.

So I started out with the accusations about incomprehensible ritualabuse at the U.S. Army's Presidio base in San Francisco and also atWest Point in the 1980s--accusations that were never prosecuted--and Iultimately followed a long and winding road to the FMSF, anorganization with a dubious genesis, a suspect mission, and, perhaps,ties to the government. Despite the FMSF's tenuous tenets and ricketyunderpinnings, it's been embraced by the media and profoundly impactedAmericans' attitudes about ritual abuse and dissociative amnesia.Though the FMSF has won the hearts and minds of millions of Americans,I can't help feeling extremely grateful that I didn't attend Boys Townwhen Father James Kelly was its director of spiritual affairs.